Psychology Part 2

I was an outsider at school. For those who don’t know, my parents are Asian Mauritian. Back then I was the only brown boy at my primary school; the south coast was a great deal less multi-cultural. That doesn’t necessitate being an outsider… but I think that the different culture my parents brought with them may have put distance between me and other people. I can remember times when we’d be studying another country or religion and out of the blue the teacher might stop the class and ask for my contribution, because I was different. They may have felt they were ticking some sort of ‘sensitive to other cultures’ box… whereas I was just a kid… wanting to be like any other kid…

I think children do generally pick on the differences between each other and they can be cruel about them. I worked as a teacher for many years and know only too well how mean we can be to each other. One particular childhood memory of my own stems from primary school, on a summer’s day at lunch break, on the school field. I don’t know how it came about but a few of the other children started taunting me. My father was a staunch pacifist and I respected him, so I never fought back unless I lost it. I walked away and the other children followed, the numbers swelled to a large crowd, growing in size as we travelled the field. Boys and girls following me like a swarm of wasps, all taunting me about the colour of my skin. The sheer number of people involved shocked me… I couldn’t have felt any more rejected. People behave differently in crowds don’t they? I would have gone home that day and not mentioned it. In fact I’ve never told anyone that story.

So my core beliefs, I’m not good enough, were firmly established in me from an early age… and although they are unhelpful and outdated now, they were understandable and they made perfect sense… given what was going on for me then.

Judy taught me that thoughts were different to feelings. She taught me that, whilst I couldn’t help my feelings, I could do something about my thoughts. Thoughts popped into my head all the time… negative thoughts. Thoughts that judged me… told me what other people were thinking… told me what terrible things would happen next. The experiences of childhood were carried through to adulthood by these unkind, critical and pessimistic voices. It was exhausting… relentless… even overwhelming.

Before I began focusing on controlling these thoughts I knew them only as my own voice and as such, embraced them. I would tell my self ‘that isn’t good enough’ … ‘you have to get this right’… ‘you don’t deserve to be doing this’. I thought this was me, driving myself to be better. I even told myself what other people were thinking, reading expression and reactions in body language. Judy quite rightly pointed out that I am not a mind reader and I often tell myself that now. I didn’t realise that I couldn’t trust my own voice, that it was working against me, that it stemmed from and supported the belief that I wasn’t good enough.

These thoughts gave rise to my anxiety… they kept me awake at night… distracted me from eating and fed on my energy. These thoughts changed how I behaved… I worked on things for too long and took on too much, what I couldn’t perfect I procrastinated over. Without realising it, I was doing everything I needed to break myself and finally prove once and for all that in fact ‘I wasn’t good enough’. After all, other people could manage couldn’t they?

And so I gave way to my own creation… the capital upon my core beliefs… my depression. I would have to learn how to manage my thoughts. Learn to recognise them when they popped into being and disown them… treat them objectively, challenge them… look for alternatives. I would start to wonder if there is anything I could do to shift this hard stone inside me, if my unhealthy beliefs about myself could ever give way to something else.